Three Reasons Why the Vatican Matters
Unfortunately
Conclave is up for an Oscar, with its lush depiction of ostensibly celibate power brokers choosing a new pontiff beneath Michelangelo masterworks. Life may imitate art soon, with Pope Francis in the hospital, no doubt dying.
Cue the processions of men in funny hats wearing their ferraioli, full-length capes, usually silk, in color-coded levels of hierarchy (only the cardinals get watered silk). I’m an ex-Catholic atheist, and I’ll tune in. No country, except perhaps the U.K., does ceremony as well as the Vatican.
And that’s a big problem.
1: The Vatican, aka the Holy See, is in fact a country. It’s one-seventh the size of New York’s Central Park, and it’s HQ for a religion, but because of years of historical drama, it’s a country.
Specifically, it’s an absolute monarchy, a theocracy kind of place. Population 783 persons, 748 of whom are men. That’s 95.5 percent. The 35 people (4.5 percent) equipped with vaginas are nuns who cook, clean, and tend, including seven cloistered Benedictine nuns who pray day and night for the Pope’s health. The Holy See consumes more wine per capita than any other country. I doubt the nuns get the good stuff.
Sound quaint? Weird but picturesque? It’s anything but. The Holy See is a country with Permanent Observer status at the UN. While every other religion sits up in the UN’s cheap seats with the NGOs, the Holy See sits on the member floor. The UN operates via consensus, so the Holy See attends conferences (on women ?!), participate in debates, can make public statements, and campaign for Catholic international agendas, most of which are crotchal in nature. The Holy See has arranged with Islamic fundamentalist and right-wing nations to restrict birth control, abortion, and other women’s health care.
The only other Permanent Observer is Palestine. Not nearly the leverage. Unlike Palestine, the Holy See owns more real estate than any entity on earth, which includes the Roman palaces in which many cardinals live. And even with the billions of dollars the Church and its dioceses have paid in sexual abuse settlements, the Vatican Bank (aka the Institute for the Works of Religion) holds an estimated €5.38 billion in accounts.
2: The Vatican hierarchy, and their “Ethical Directives,” govern most of the healthcare on Earth.
The Catholic Church is the largest non-governmental supplier of healthcare worldwide; one in six Americans depends on a Catholic hospital for healthcare, and may not even know it until they go in for a procedure that contradicts Catholic teaching.
Throughout Africa, for example, the Catholic Church provides 40 to 70 percent of available, especially rural, healthcare. All of these providers, worldwide, are bound to the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (ERDs) to guide them on matters of human dignity, morals, bla bla bla. Their reasoning on how to treat an ectopic pregnancy is easily recognized by anyone schooled in Catholicism: …The embryo also eventually dies. Its demise is foreseen, but not intended. The physician's action is directed at the pathological and harmful tissue, and not at the embryo. Great—how’s the woman doing, by the way?
Of course, in some parts of the developing world, condom access from health centers is pivotal for preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS. We’ve probably all heard the lies Catholic prelates have disseminated, that condoms don’t protect from HIV and actually cause harm. Pope Benedict XVI once made a statement that condoms can be a “first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants.” And if one wants to prevent HIV?
There’s a contradiction here: the primacy of conscience. This RC doctrine requires that Catholics actively discern their way in complex ethical situations and that individual conscience should be the final arbiter in all moral decision-making. (The seven types of conscience are: correct, erroneous, certain, doubtful, lax, scrupulous, and delicate. I think I had to memorize these in school.)
But if you go to the only nearby hospital for a vasectomy, and it’s Catholic, and your certain conscience and your doctor’s correct conscience agree you need one, since another pregnancy could kill your wife, you’re still out of luck.
Here's a look at their priorities. In 2004 I was accidentally very present for a canonization at the Vatican. The newly honored saint was Gianna Molla, an Italian OB/GYN who knew she couldn’t carry her fourth pregnancy without likely losing her life. She wouldn’t abort—yay! And she died of sepsis in 1962, leaving four children without a mother. “A saint for our time,” crowed the Vatican. Three adult surviving children attended her canonization, with Gianna’s spouse the first husband to see his wife made a saint—yay!
(Strangely, the Vatican ushers sat me next to Gianna’s family on a dais near the pope. After the ceremony, as I was acting devout and keeping my mouth very shut, they and I were shepherded over to the sickly John Paul II in his chair. We were lined up right behind him for photos. I was so close I could smell his laundry detergent, could see both his hearing aids and his drool. I could have taken him out. I’m sure they had to photoshop me out of their photos.)
3: The Vatican damages the planet.
Officially, the Catholic Church doesn’t believe Earth is overpopulated. It condemns what it calls “ecologism.” It asserts, “The message on climate change coincides perfectly with any pro-life activism...” Sure. Just make sure all nine kids fit in your raft.
Instead of resolving the problems of the poor… some can only propose a reduction in the birth rate…To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues.
And “… it must nonetheless be recognized that demographic growth is fully compatible with an integral and shared development.”
The footnote for this “truth” that “demographic growth is fully compatible” with good things is a 2004 document by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, a handful of cardinals at the Vatican. No ecologists, demographers, nada.
Here’s the established equation for environmental impact: I = P x A x T, or "Impact equals Population multiplied by Affluence multiplied by Technology." Say you have a poor woman with eight kids who can’t get birth control. If five of them grow up to have lots of kids, and they have to slash and burn and cut trees to grow food and build cooking fires in soot-spewing stoves, or have no choice but to work on palm oil plantations that destroy orangutan habitat, or to kill and eat bush meat, and meanwhile humanity relies on biodiversity, this equation says we’re fucked. That’s the P in the equation. It’s a very different we’re-fucked factor from the A x T side, such as Americans grillin’ all that meat at multiple huge air conditioned houses, with cars, trucks, boats, Bitcoin, ATVs, and private jets, but it still means we’re fucked.
It’s BOTH, you clown cardinals. Population and Affluent consumption.
And before anyone quotes any First World “birth dearth” figures at me, it’s the rate of population increase that’s declining, not the population itself. As of 2022, that rate applies to the 8 billion people on Earth. Globally, we add more than 66 million people every year. We add 183,000 humans every day, according to the Population Media Center, which does laudable work explaining the benefits of family planning and of the education of women and girls (the latter is absolutely key to better lives for the poor). As PMC says, “each person needs and deserves sufficient land, water, shelter, food, and energy for a decent life.” Each person will also contribute waste. At this population size, our planet can no longer handle it.
And so what if the actual population eventually declines? There are options beyond a capitalist growth economy. Economies can adapt to smaller populations and much less consumption. Fewer humans, living fulfilling, lower-impact lives could allow nonhuman populations to recover and the planet to start to heal itself, as it temporarily did during Covid.
One last thing. Ever hear of the Earth Charter? I’m pretty sure you haven’t. It is a document, the fruit of 10 years of grassroots work in which people all over the world were asked what kind of lives they wanted on this planet. (See below.) All kinds of people, from dirt-poor farmers and tribal members to Mikhail Gorbachev and a Rockefeller to Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize-winner Wangari Maathai supported its worldview of “the community of life.” It was supposed to supersede previous UN environmental documents and propose a new environmental ethic everyone wanted.
A Church-approved Catholic family organization reacted:
In the Earth Charter, the centrality and uniqueness of the human person vanishes in order to make room for a more generic “community of life,” in which man is considered on the same level as animals and vegetation.
Not true, except yes; “man” is admittedly unique: the only known species that soils his own nest.
Remember No. 1 above, the Vatican being a country? I knew an academic who worked on the Earth Charter and was in touch with the Catholic hierarchy about it. When an archbishop she knew saw the Charter, he complained it wasn’t “transcendent” enough; it was “too immanent.”
It's a pagan document, and we will kill it in the UN, the archbishop said.
I’ve asked others tangentially involved with the Earth Charter what happened; some didn’t know, some said it was preempted at the UN by the 9/11/2001 attacks. Anyway, it was shuffled off to obscurity.
In a just world, the Vatican would be restricted to its most beneficial operations: Kick-ass museums, and the most reliable post office in Rome.
So when the pope dies, and they choose a new one, and you wonder why any non-Catholic would care, that’s just the beginning. By the way, newscasters will claim the pope is the spiritual head “of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.” They still count people like me, baptized before I could object. But that’s another story.
https://c-fam.org/wp-content/uploads/Sustainable-Development-FINAL5.pdf